Self Protection is our natural right.

How Predator Mindset Works.

First things first, A predator doesn’t just attack out of the blue, even though the prey feels that way, the fact remains that attacks don’t happen out of nowhere. There are signs and precursors to an attack that most fail to identify.

Commonly referred to as pre-contact cues by many, these are the signs that help you identify a potential threat and take appropriate action/s to combat and escape the said threat.

A predator follows a pattern of thought and actions that is ingrained in every predatory species by nature. Humans by nature are predators too. Even though some don’t realize it. We have that instinct in us. It just is subsided by the social engineering throughout our childhood and continued well into adulthood.

Some are virtually impervious to that conditioning or just resist it.
Some lack the psychological capacity to grasp the conditioning due to biological factors.
Some train in a way to relinquish that conditioning.
Some are conditioned and brought up in an anti-social and hostile environment and are the products of their environment.
Some are more in touch with their violent instincts despite their environment.

No matter what, there are individuals who are in touch with those predator instincts and when the time comes to act on those instincts they follow a similar pattern to the other predators.

The predatory pattern is as follows:

Search: In this phase, the predator looks for an easy target by scanning the environment. They will pick the most vulnerable, most unaware target, with the most value and success rate.

Identify: The identification phase begins immediately after the search stage is complete. When they acquire their target, they will scan their target and look for openings and weak points of their target. Their body language, etc. This phase is an enhancer to the search phase so they can confirm their target and begin their next phase.

Stalk: After identifying a target, most predators will follow their prey for a while, now this can be for a few seconds to a few minutes to days, weeks, months and sometimes even a year until they make their move. This depends on the type of target and the predator, for example, kidnapping a high profile target requires a lot of reconnaissance and intelligence, etc. To plan an immaculate kidnapping. On the other hand, mugging someone in an isolated or lightly populated location or snatching a purse from someone in market place or at night when they’re going home from work, in those situations, the predator may only follow for a few seconds or a minute before making a move.

Trap: The next step immediately after stalking is trapping the target, so the prey doesn’t escape, until the predator gets what they came for. This will include cutting off the exit, overwhelming the prey with intimidation tactics to induce panic, which will trigger the flight or fight response, including the freeze response, ensuring that the exist routes have been sealed for the prey and if the prey does try to escape, chances would be high, that they would make a fatal mistake.

Ambush: This next phase isn’t next, as it’s part of the Trap phase. Ambush is integrated in the trap phase, but for the sake of analyzing the predator mindset, I cut it up and put it in a different section. Ambush is where the predator initiates the attack. It can either be a solo attack or it can be a group. This phase is where the prey is overwhelmed, leaving them almost no time to react. Notice I said, ‘Almost’. Meaning there will be time. Just not enough, if the prey doesn’t know what to do or how to do it.

Attack: Final phase is the attack itself, after the initiation of the attack, classified as an ambush, this phase is also a part of trap and ambush, it consists of the physical assault itself, this phase is where the prey is injured and/or killed if it fails to escape or fight back.

Aftermath: Is the additional phase that only applies in the human society, this phase involves, psychological trauma, physical trauma, paranoia, depression in the victim that survives. The family will go through psychological trauma and similar other effects if victim doesn’t survive. If the victim survives by killing the predator, and is convicted due to certain laws, legal consequences will be added to above mentioned effects.

Now, am I writing this to scare the living daylights out of you? Maybe… Sometimes you just need a good scare to snap the hell out of whatever fantasy world you’re living in and I think this fairly detailed article might do that for some individuals, but here’s the thing, even if I wrote it to “scare” you, that doesn’t make what I wrote untrue, okay?

On the contrary, I’m writing this so you can understand the predatory mindset and try to reverse engineer it, to keep yourself safe and be a hard target.
Now many will ask, ‘How to reverse engineer it?’

Here’s how, as an example, take the first phase of a predatory attack, ‘Search’. Now if you fail the predator’s test in this phase by not being an easy target, a valuable target, the predator will pass you over for an easier (than you) target. That’s it. That’s self protection. You prevented the attack from happening in the first place.

You won’t even need to apply reverse engineering to the other phases, because you won’t be there in the first place, you’re gone, safe home.

Of course if you fail to fail the first predator test, there are ways to reverse engineer other phases too, all it takes is the right kind of training. If I start to write an article on that, it will go on for hundreds of pages, as there are virtually countless possibilities and virtually countless methods to reverse engineer them.

Now mind you, I’m not talking about techniques here, no, I’m talking about strategies of reverse engineering them, not, ‘How do I put them in a flying armbar?’.

Here’s the thing, if you only understand the principles of violence and the predator mindset, you won’t need to know millions of things and train them for another million years, no, you’ll just need a handful of effective principles, and in case if things go awry, some physical and psychological methods to keep yourself safe.

Hopefully, I was clear enough in conveying the message I was trying to send in this article. If not, here’s a simple message; Train Realistically.
Well, that’s it. Thank you for reading.

Additional notes –

This article just describes the predatory behavior at the basest level. There’s much more to it than these phases, but these phases give you an understanding of the predatory MO, on a fundamental level.

Not all assaults are as physically violent as described in the article, in some cases, psychological manipulation and threats are used rather than physical intimidation so that the predator doesn’t leave any evidence or any physical evidence to actually be convicted in the court of law.

Fundamental predatory behavior is used by generally anyone who victimizes individuals weaker than them and on those they see as easy targets, this ranges from a mugger, to a hostile psychopath to female predators to a sociopathic playboy who manipulates women into doing things that they may not want to or even an abusive spouse. It doesn’t just apply to one type of psychopath/sociopath or one gender, etc. Predators are predators, regardless of their origins, etc. They don’t follow the same societal etiquette as the rest of us. Examples in the article were given only as a means to get the point across.

Predators are all around us, at work, at school, in your neighborhood, but there are different kinds and levels of predators.

Not every individual can be considered as a zero threat, but not every individual is a highly dangerous psychopath either.

Fear is different and paranoia is different, while fear is an essential part of our safety, paranoia isn’t. Having a paranoid state of mind does not equal being aware or vigilant, it’s the opposite in fact. It’s Hyper-vigilance and it isn’t healthy for you or helpful to your safety. Embrace fear, but don’t live with paranoia.

Some have a predatory mindset which they utilize to get ahead in life (one example can be the career driven aggressive gogetters, they appear to demonstrate many sociopathic traits, doesn’t mean they’re serial killers). Some utilize predatory behavior to hurt others in numerous ways for their pleasure and personal gain.

Know the difference between someone who just has the mindset of a predator and someone who actually is a predator.

Misidentification can lead to a lot of complications for everyone involved (Refer to the paranoia point no. 6 above). Be careful and Be sure first.

But the fight or flight thing is based on a misunderstanding of nature. There is a third option used very frequently by prey animals and one that most victims can identify with… Play dead. Many creatures freeze in the hope that this will save them. It is not a lack of action but an actual strategy that works sometimes.

As you can see, I’ve already mentioned the freeze response.
Here’s the thing about that response, in some animals it is indeed a response, but not in all animals, which include humans. If a human tried to play dead in front of a mugger, that human will be dead for real. “Freeze response” in humans is just your brain not being able to compile a solution to the ongoing threat, due to the lack of information. An individual who has not been in an adrenalized situation before, will most likely fail to react to it, if faced with one, they won’t know what do to and freeze in fear.

The Freeze response does work that way in animals though, that I agree, and in humans, it’s our primal brain thinking, “If i don’t move, the predator won’t see me”. But the only reason it resorts to that thinking is because it has not been given any other information on how to react in those situations other than what’s ingrained as an evolutionary trait. Early humans didn’t have to worry about muggers, they had to worry about other animals eating them and their children.

Anyway, due to that ‘response’ the brain basically reverts to an easiest default option. Our brain is like a computer, if not regularly updated, will not function optimally.

Even though technically we’re all animals, i.e. in the animal kingdom, same rules just don’t apply to the species, Homo Sapiens. ‘Animal world’ rules are very different that our societal rules.